@sparklegram
Hi!
I took injections for years. I was told by each doctor that as long as the shots are given no more than 3 to 4 times a year I should be fine.

SHOULD is the catch phrase. Since everyone is different, there are no guarantees.

That being said, having chronic pain 24/7, I was willing to try anything and everything for relief. THIS WAS MY PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY.

After over a decade of trying whatever was out there, and everything stopped working, I opted for surgery. I am now pain free.
Ronnie

@sparklegram I had one epidural injection in my neck and it was not a good experience. The injection did take away the pain that I was having everywhere from spinal cord compression, but it also caused a new pain that I didn't already have that they called a paresthesia. It happened instantly from pressure when he injected the fluid that had nowhere to go. He then injected a dye because he wanted to know where the steroid was. It was the most pain I had ever experienced that was off the charts and I was convulsing and shaking uncontrollably for a long time and on my way to passing out. They reminded me to breathe, and because I had been practicing relaxing with slow deep breaths to music, I did that and visualized being somewhere else and thought about music and manged to stay conscious, but I shook for about a half hour. Nothing touched that extreme pain at all and the steroid prescription they gave me didn't help. The pain targeted my index finger and thumb, and 3rd finger of my dominant hand, and I got unpredictable severe stabbing pains that were electric shocks. If I moved my neck or hand at all, the pains stabbed again. If I touched the nerve pathway in my hand at all with anything, I got an electric shock. The advice they gave me was to get in bed, prop my hand on a pillow and don't move. Just stay there, and it may take a few days to subside. It took about 2 weeks before the level and frequency of pain began to back off. Then it took about 6 weeks total until the pains stopped, but I had cold sensitivity in that hand for over a year. This was done as a diagnostic procedure by a doctor who later decided not to offer surgery to me for my cervical spinal stenosis, and he didn't analyze the results or discuss them with me. His nurse suggested that I do more of these injections, and I refused. The procedure did answer a question for me in that it stopped all the pain I had previously completely for 5 days before it slowly started coming back. My case had an unusual presentation of symptoms with pain all over my body from a spine problem in my neck. That is what had confused the 5 surgeons who wouldn't help me, and when I found medical literature with cases like mine and the patients had the same experience in the unusual symptoms that were resolved temporarily by the injection, I knew that cervical spine surgery would resolve all that pain. There is no diagnostic test to prove that before surgery, and my surgery at Mayo did fix all the pain I had. Having pain referred all over the body or to a place where it is unexpected is called funicular pain. This was something I asked about when I asked to be seen at Mayo, and I sent the medical case studies in with my request. There are significant risks with these injections if they are injected in the wrong place or into a nerve or the spinal cord. They don't fix anything, but they can buy some time before surgery. I know in my case, with bone spurs constantly advancing into my spinal cord, a delay in having surgery would just increase the risk of permanent damage. It took 2 years for me to work through the surgeons who were not going to help me, and I lost some muscle because of it. Some of it has come back, and I am still working on it. You'll have to decide if it is of enough benefit to you to make the risk worth it. You do have a choice and can say no if you don't agree with the doctor.